Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, shadow banned by Twitter

Source: Scott Adams’ Blog – Scott Adams says he was shadow banned by Twitter. Apparently the ban has been removed as I can see his Tweets on Twitter at this time.

Shadow banning is a form of propaganda messaging that I overlooked.

A “shadow ban” is a sneaky way of censoring someone’s voice by hiding their output from everyone else – but still enabling the poster to see his or her own posts. The poster is unaware of the censorship because the censorship itself is hidden from the poster.

In recent days, I learned that my Occupy Propaganda blog has been shadow banned by Facebook since December 15, 2016. For the past two months, I saw my posts appearing in my own Facebook news line and was unaware that my posts had become invisible to everyone else.

Since my blog critically examines the use of social media, including Facebook, for the spread of propaganda, this looks ugly for Facebook. Has someone at Facebook decided that discussing how social media is used for propaganda messaging is off limits?

Shadow banning is another form of propaganda, designed to cut off discussion of alternative topics and viewpoints.

What Facebook Did

About December 15th, the posts from this blog, which were automatically cross posted to the Facebook group page “Occupy Propaganda” began being shadow banned. I saw the posts in my own news feed and was unaware that these posts were invisible to everyone else – for two months.

It is possible that Facebook’s software algorithms (using artificial stupidity methods) misidentified this web site as spam. Their standard response to spam is to initially shadow ban the poster.

I can – manually – continue to cross post these items on the Facebook page and they will appear for all to see. However, that adds an extra hurdle for me to post this content.

Is Facebook censoring discussion of the use of social media for propaganda? No matter how you look at this episode, this is terrible optics for Facebook and it provides ample fodder that social media dictators will control public speech of the future.